‘Like Open Confectionery Shops’: female convents and commercial competition in eighteenth-century Valencia

This study examines how the production of sweets in female convents came to be perceived as serious competition by master confectioners in eighteenth-century Valencia, in the crucial period when sugar became more widely available and consumed in Europe. While guilds’ opposition to women’s participation in trades has long been a subject of scholarly debate, this newly-discovered case study invites us to further explore the market-oriented activities of nuns, who have rarely been integrated into dominant narratives of trade, gender, and labour in early modern Europe. By confronting judicial records, visitation reports and convent account books, this study argues that, rather than a recreational pastime, as is often assumed, nuns’ production of sweets contributed to maintain their patronage networks, and alleviate their precarious finances, even when these activities ran alongside—and sometimes in competition with—those of male guild members.